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Trade deals
NAFTA: The Next Generation
BC and Alberta’s TILMA agreement threatens to debase municipal powers
By Devon Bates
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A free market economy: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Campbell Liberals. Their four-year mission: to explore strange new deals, to seek out new laws and new implementations, to boldly profit where no profit has been made before.
Sadly, the Trade Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) is neither science nor fiction. Coming into effect April 1, 2007, it will make fools of us all.
Touted as a measure to increase the flow of goods and employment between British Columbia and Alberta, TILMA is an interprovincial free trade deal dictating what governments can and cannot do. Disputes will be settled by an unelected board to whom the government must prove a new measure is "legitimate" as defined by TILMA, that achieving the objective is not more restrictive to business than "necessary," and that the government is not engaged "in a disguised restriction on trade, investment, or labour mobility."
Worse than NAFTA
Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan is among a growing number of those very concerned about the agreement's negative and far-reaching effects, saying in a February council meeting that TILMA is "even more egregious than anything that has been done in the international trade agreements." Corrigan fears cities may be sued by companies using the agreement to bully governments into making regulations more appealing to business, and that TILMA is an "attempt to take away the powers of municipalities."
In six out of the six cases where governments have tried to prove what they were doing was "necessary" to the existing Agreement on Internal Trade, they have lost. With TILMA, the onus is on government to prove there was no alternative which would be less restrictive to business, regardless of what most people want or what is in the best interests of the public, and governments will have to pay up to $5 million if these "violations" are not withdrawn.
Not only was there no public consultation or debate about joining the agreement in the BC Legislature, but in early March the BC Liberals voted down a motion which would have allowed Legislative debate of TILMA. Said Michael Sather, New Democrat Intergovernmental Relations critic, "The Campbell government signed onto TILMA behind closed doors, denying voters the opportunity to review the agreement . . . . [They have] a responsibility to advise all affected organizations about the deal. Yet many have been left in the dark about what TILMA is and what effect it will have."
I emailed Gordon Campbell about my concerns. A timely two months later, Colin Hansen replied on his behalf. (The delay was the result of an empty Legislature—after all, there was nothing to discuss.) "TILMA contains no requirement to harmonize," Hansen wrote to me. "Rather, it calls for joint reconciliation, ideally through mutual recognition of standards and regulations."
Tied to Alberta
After looking through different thesauruses which all listed "harmonize" as a synonym of "reconcile," I thought about what joint reconciliation of standards might look like with a province not known for its progressive attitudes. December 14, 2006, Minister of Industry Maxime Bernier told the Senate banking committee, when testifying about TILMA, that "Mutual recognition is an important principle from the economic standpoint because . . . such a situation places regulators in competition with one another." “Regulators in competition” means governments racing to the bottom with weaker and weaker regulations.
If BC and Alberta were the only ones getting in on it, things would be scary enough, but there has been interest in other provinces in signing on to this mad deal as well, and word some US states want to join in.
Enraged? There's more. Search "TILMA" on canadians.org and policyalternatives.ca, or check out stoptilma.com for info, ideas, and links.
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